CLASSIC FILMS

KEITH UHLICH

All That Heaven Allows (1955, Douglas Sirk, United States)

In honor of those mythical April showers, our four classics this month all bring forth a different kind of deluge—copious tears. (At least they do for this writer, and hopefully for you as well.) Start off with Douglas Sirk’s sublime suburban melodrama about a widowed housewife (Jane Wyman) who falls in love with her sensitive, hunky gardener (Rock Hudson), and the social ostracization that ensues. Sirk was a German émigré to America who treated Hollywood product with an insight and depth that often belied the slick surfaces, and this is one of his premier efforts. Look, for example, at the famous image in which Wyman’s widow is visually trapped within a television screen that her judgmental family has bought as a gift—like much of the film it’s a visual both intellectually stimulating

April showers bring copious tears

and emotionally devastating. All That Heaven Allows was additionally a key text for Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) and Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven), who both noted its power to make the waterworks flow. (Streaming on Criterion Channel.)

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg, United States/United Kingdom)

A science-fiction fable for your next classic tearjerker: Steven Spielberg’s unsettling masterpiece traces the journey of a robot boy (Haley Joel Osment) who is imprinted with feelings of love for his adoptive mother (Frances O’Connor). Are those emotions real or mechanically fabricated? They certainly get put to the test when she abandons the mecha boy in the woods, forcing him to fend for himself and to travel many miles and years until he is (sort of) reunited with mommy. Spielberg’s tendency toward sentiment is wellmatched with the project, which originated with Stanley Kubrick, whose chilliness Spielberg also honors here in the overarching vision of mankind on a spiritual and moral precipice. The astonishing finale visualizes what it might be like when humanity is but a memory; it makes you cry for both a nonhuman individual and an entire species. (Streaming on Amazon.)